Ganesh Narasimhadevara, Principal Technologist for ASEAN and India at New Relic, discusses how digital wellness apps are improving healthcare outcomes and reducing the strain on India’s over stretched healthcare infrastructure
India’s economic growth has dramatically accelerated in the past decade, with the IMF forecasting that the country will retain its spot as the fastest growing major economy in 2023. While the economic resurgence has generated higher incomes and prosperity over the past few decades, it has also contributed to a surge in lifestyle-related diseases, including obesity, diabetes and heart disease. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death globally, with India accounting for one-fifth of worldwide fatalities. However, it’s not all doom and gloom. Encouragingly, India has been experiencing a country-wide health revolution. Telemedicine is on the rise, thanks to its ability to provide access to high-quality and affordable healthcare. The growing use and ability for citizens to adopt tech-enabled healthcare has also seen a surge in wellness apps.
Mobile health (mHealth) is a rapidly emerging segment in India, with recent figures from Statista showing that the number of health and fitness app downloads across the country grew to 245 million in 2021, with meditation, mental health and fitness emerging as the most popular. COVID-19 played a huge role in fuelling consumer demand for mHealth but high smartphone penetration is also part of the reason why Indians are changing the way they use healthcare services.
A new healthcare delivery channel
Developers are responding to the demand for mHealth through innovative apps that offer tailor-made fitness solutions, nutrition plans and workout routines that address individual health and fitness goals. One such app is HealthifyMe. With a vision to ‘healthify’ a billion lives, the app has over 35 million downloads and 1500-plus nutrition, fitness, and yoga coaches.
Apps like HealthifyMe could help ease the burden on the country’s healthcare infrastructure, which is already under enormous strain from the rising prevalence of cardiovascular diseases.
To ensure that mHealth reaches those who need it the most, efforts must be made to address affordability, accessibility, and digital literacy challenges. In addition, it is imperative that mHealth is designed to meet the specific needs and constraints of different communities.
In the long run, mHealth can help overcome the traditional barriers of reach, access, and a lack of trained health professionals in the prevention and management of lifestyle-related diseases. As smartphone usage shows no signs of abating in India, there is enormous opportunity for mHealth to develop further and contribute to a robust wellness ecosystem.
Of course, building a healthy population will require resilient technology to facilitate behavioural change through AI-enabled smart plans, consultations with fitness experts, and connected wearable devices. The technology will also need to be able to scale quickly to meet the ever-growing needs of a billion people. This is where the technology of observability plays a pivotal role. It enables organisations to measure how a system or app performs and identifies issues and errors based on external outputs (called telemetry data) and includes metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT).
Observability provides a connected, real-time view of all data from different sources in one place where teams can collaborate to troubleshoot and resolve problems faster, prevent issues from occurring, ensure operational efficiency, and produce high-quality software that promotes an optimal customer and user experience.
Observability offers app developers complete visibility, enabling them to scale their systems based on how traffic is moving, without compromising on performance, cost, or the customer experience. It creates a single source of truth based on real-time data, with enhanced system resilience and the ability to ensure peak demand performance. This naturally accelerates application modernisation and improves the user experience.
There is no doubt that the proliferation of health and wellness devices and apps in India over the next few years will create vast data volumes that will need to be processed seamlessly. Consequently, it will be critical for the mobile medical app industry to invest in the right tech infrastructure to feed the golden goose and support burgeoning consumer needs. This will underpin the government’s efforts to overcome barriers that are slowing the adoption of mHealth in India and ultimately improve cost, access and quality of patient care.
- Advertisement -